9/01/2009 @ 12:01AM

The Birth Of Modern Terrorism?

On May 6, 1947, a 16-year-old Jewish boy, Alexander Rubowitz, was seized in Jerusalem by a major in the British Army, Roy Alexander St. Thomas Farran. He drove Rubowitz outside the city, tied him to an olive tree, interrogated him for an hour and then killed him by smashing a rock into his head.

Farran or the policemen he supervised then stabbed the corpse repeatedly.

Farran fled to Syria, then to Transjordan. When he finally faced a trial before a British court martial in Jerusalem, it acquitted him after suppressing evidence of two confessions, one on self-incrimination grounds and the other on the basis of attorney-client privilege. It found that the presence of Farran’s name written in the hatband of a trilby found at the scene of Rubowitz’s abduction was insufficient cause to convict him of the murder of a victim whose body had not been recovered.

Farran then returned to Britain, where a package addressed to “R. Farran” at his family home was opened by his brother Rex, who was killed by the enclosed bomb. The Fighters for the Freedom of Israel, a group known by its Hebrew acronym Lehi, claimed responsibility.

This is the story that provides the narrative backbone of David Cesarani’s Major Farran’s Hat, and a riveting and dramatic one it is. Along the way, Cesarani, a professor of history at Royal Holloway College of the University of London, attempts to document what he calls “the full extent and ambition of Jewish terrorism in the late 1940s,” an effort he refers to as “the first modern international terrorist campaign.”

Framing the story this way allows Cesarani to contextualize the murder of Rubowitz as a counterterrorist operation and to conclude with a warning that “At a time when counter-insurgency warfare is once again at the forefront of military operation by the British Army and NATO, it is perhaps an opportune moment to revisit the events that took place on that balmy evening in Jerusalem sixty years ago as warning of everything that can go wrong when young warriors directed by desperate and unscrupulous politicians wage war on terror.”

It’s hard to communicate just how misguided this interpretive framework is. If anyone is a terrorist in this story, it’s Farran, who has killed a civilian, Rubowitz, to advance the political goal of keeping the British in control of Palestine, where they had been granted a League of Nations mandate after World War I. All Rubowitz had been doing was putting up some Zionist posters.

It’s clear where Cesarani’s sympathies lie–he refers to the British as “brilliant, courageous” heroes, while the Jews are “murderous.” Violence against the Jews seems always to be the fault of the victims; thus, the 1929 Arab riots in which more than 100 Jews were killed are said by Cesarani to be a consequence of “the growing number and assertiveness of the Jews,” and attacks on synagogues and Jewish-owned stores and factories in Liverpool, Manchester and Glasgow in August 1947 to be the result of “the antipathy generated by Jewish terrorism.”

The author’s definition of “terrorism” is one that will strike many readers as careless or overly broad. Cesarani at one point references the “vicious terrorist attacks on the security forces.” But if attacks on British troops by those seeking self-rule and independence from a colonial power constitute “terrorist attacks,” then the American minutemen at Lexington and Concord were terrorists too. The term starts to lose meaning. Most of us today think of terrorist attacks as those targeting civilians, not security forces.

Cesarani describes a Zionist bombing of the British embassy in Rome as another example of “Jewish terrorism.” But the embassy was a center of British attempts to prevent the hundreds of thousands of Jewish Holocaust refugees in Europe from making their way to the land of Israel, and the author even acknowledges that the bomb was timed intentionally to cause “minimum loss of life.” The only person injured was “an unlucky Italian who was cycling past.”

Given that Allied forces had just bombed Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki and inflicted hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties, for the British to get on a high horse about a bombing that was timed deliberately to cause minimum loss of life is not only hypocritical but morally obtuse. The targets chosen by the Israeli fighters–British police headquarters in Haifa, the Tel Aviv British Military district, the British Colonial Club in London, the British Officers Club and the British civil administration headquarters wing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem–were overwhelmingly not the civilian buses, pizza parlors or discos favored for attack by Israel’s Islamist enemies of today. They were, instead, the government officials and troops of a colonial power that was barring the immigration of Jewish refugees to Israel and that was clinging to arbitrary, non-democratic and un-free rule in Palestine despite having promised in the 1917 Balfour Declaration that it would “view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.”

Not that every action of Lehi was admirable or even defensible; its leader, Avraham Stern, tried to make contact with the Nazis and offered to fight on their side of World War II if they backed a Jewish homeland in Israel. But it would be a mistake to tar the whole Zionist cause with the terrorist label, as Mr. Cesarani veers close to doing.

In 2005 the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz printed an interview with the man who built the bomb that killed Rex Farran. The journalist who conducted the interview, Yossi Melman, asked the bomber, Yaakov Heruti, if he was a terrorist. “Absolutely not,” Heruti said. “The struggle was directed against soldiers and policemen and symbols of the ruling authority. I was a fighter against the English and not a terrorist, because I did not intend to harm innocent people knowingly. Of course, in war innocent people get hurt, but that was not the goal.”

He acknowledged, however, that, “From the point of view of the English, I was a terrorist who deserved to die.”

In Major Farran’s Hat, Cesarani has told the story from the point of view of the English. The result leaves Israel as a kind of British Vietnam–a failed counterinsurgency campaign. How much more constructive it would be for Britain to take pride in its contributions toward the birth of the Jewish state and to seek a “special relationship” of the sort it shares with that other former colony where it fought a failed counterinsurgency campaign, America. Give it time.